Today way back in 1991, Brian Williamson’s and Nick Abadzis’ cover to The Real Ghostbusters #47 and Art Wetherell’s for Transformers and Visionaries #216 were shining bright from newsagent shelves across the UK. As far as I’m concerned, together they make quite the impact.
I’ve mentioned recently how I’m currently watching Doctor Who from the very beginning and have been for nearly two years. Before I began, I took somewhat less time to enjoy every episode of Grand Designs on Channel 4 (resulting in me beginning to pay for it so I didn’t have any ads while doing so – bliss) and one of Kevin McCloud’s rules is never cut down grand old trees. Advice Egon should’ve followed and he might not have ended up being turned into his favourite fungi.
I really enjoyed these split screen Transformers covers, highlighting the new story format inside. It’s a shame they didn’t do more of them because over the next 100 issues there were some great double-bills I’d loved to have seen presented on the cover this way. Inside, there’s news of the first UK stories to be created specifically for the new five-page black and white strips. I think it would’ve eased the blow for some long-time readers if they’d waited until they were ready to change the comic’s make up.
Race With the Devil was memorable for two reasons. The first being Andrew Wildman’s depiction of a team of archeologists who were very similar to the stars of the sister comic in the photo above. The second was it ending on the reanimated corpse of Starscream. That image stayed with me for decades! Check it out at the link below. The trouble with having three stories now of course means there’s less room for details of each in the checklist, which is a shame because it’s a blinder of an issue.
Last week’s Action Force Monthly and Thundercats instalments remain for obvious reasons, while the only new entry is another monthly title which’ll most likely also be stuck here for a few more checklists. This issue’s slapstick humour perfectly complimented the action and wry wit of Death’s Head, making it one of the funniest issues of the run, which was no small feat.
We’re in the middle of a bit of a dry spell as far as comics adverts go and this continues next week, but don’t despair they’ll be back soon to tug at the ol’ grey cells.
Prepare to feel very old, for 2026 is OiNK’s 40th anniversary! That’s right, 40 years since we met the likes of Uncle Pigg, Tom Thug, Horace ‘Ugly Face’ Watkins, Psycho Gran, Burp and Ham Dare. Four decades! To help us original pig pals through this difficult time the OiNK Blog has a myriad of posts planned to celebrate, beginning with five throughout the comic’s original launch window. There’ll also be three celebrating a certain celebrity phenomenon the following month, a certain infamous anniversary later this summer and a series of posts to see us through the birthdays of all the issues.
As each post is published its name will turn into a piggy pink link below
The day of writing this post is the anniversary of OiNK’s Preview edition, then we’ll kick things off on the 40th anniversary of the first proper issue. That’s when I’ll be writing about my own personal Piggin’ Awesome Memories and why OiNK is such an important part of my life. I’ve talked to many others about their personal memories of the comic, it’s about time I shared mine on Sunday 3rd May 2026. Then, the following week brings Germs, a pre-OiNK comic created by co-editor Mark Rodgers and writer Graham Exton while at university. Its contents even included precursors to actual OiNK characters. You could say it was a preview of things to come and the whole shebang will be here to enjoy on Saturday 9th May.
In the same month there’ll be two special behind-the-scenes posts. The first, Roger & Willy: True Originals, looks at the original versions of Weedy Willy and Roger Rental as created (and drawn) by Graham. That’ll be published on Saturday 16th May. Then you’ll get to see the original script doodles and notes by Mark for a memorable wee Davey Jones’ strip, in The Making of a Mad Monk: Davey Jones on Saturday 23rd May.
On Saturday 30th May I’ll be chatting to Claire Bend and Robert Reed of Bread and Butter Films. Why would I want to do that as part of OiNK’s birthday celebrations? Well, what if I told you they were currently putting together a mini OiNK documentary? One in which they’ve spoken to a bunch of OiNK contributors (and a certain blogger) and they’re in the editing stage already? Excited? Then be sure to check out my chat with the duo in OiNK: A Short Tail!
Then, in an exclusive for the OiNK Blog you’ll be able to read all about the first edit for the film that’s being prepared, along with screenshots and details of who you’ll see when it’s finally released. This’ll be the first time anyone other than the filmmakers themselves will have seen any of the film and I can’t wait to watch it and (after cringing at my accent) tell you all about it in a special Piggs, Puns, Plops: OiNK Documentary Preview post on Saturday 27th June.
The celebrations will continue into the summer and beyond. During June and July you’ll get three fortnightly doses of OiNK’s megastar himself, Frank Sidebottom. It all begins on Sunday 21st June with his special appearance in OiNK publisher Fleetway’sThunderbirds The Comic in the 1990s. Then watch out for some film reviews! Namely, the Being Frank documentary and the Frank movie. I haven’t seen either yet so I’m looking forward to catching up at last on Saturday 4th and Saturday 18th July respectively.
At the end of July I’ll be delving into an infamous moment in OiNK’s history. The brilliant Janice and John spoof children’s tale in #7 prompted a complaint to the Press Council. It would be brushed aside in the end and OiNK celebrated the fact in a later issue but despite that it still led a certain defunct newsagent chain to top-shelf the comic. Sometimes OiNK contributor and Mark Rodgers’ partner, Helen Jones sent me the correspondence between the complainant, publisher IPC and the OiNK editors so it should make for a fascinating insight into The OiNK Complaint on Saturday 26th July.
Finally for the blog itself there’ll be a new series that’ll mark the 40th anniversary of the whole run, right the way through to the final issues in October 2028. The new Grunts series began with a celebrity special last Christmas (2025), and if Uncle Pigg ever chose you to appear in the world’s greatest comic you’ll not want to miss these! Every three months I’ll be collecting together all of your reader contributions. These didn’t start appearing until #4 so the series will begin three months after that on Sunday 6th September 2026. I may never have written in but I’m looking forward to this series, and I’m positive there’ll be plenty of you out there that will too.
Don’t forget to follow the OiNK Blog on socials via the links in the menu at the top of the page. Over the next couple of years every single issue will be highlighted on their original release dates with their covers and direct links to their reviews. Perfect if you’d like to relive the entire run in real time for yourself over its 40th anniversary years.
Happy Birthday OiNK! You don’t look a day over 39.
Ponquadragor returns on Anthony Williams and Dave Harwood’s cover! If you never collected The Real Ghostbusters this will be lost on you, and let’s face it if you never collected it you were already missing out big time.
In a turn up for the books it’s Transformers and Visionaries that brings us a light-hearted cover this week, courtesy of Jeff Anderson. Inside, the UK strip was now black and white. This saved money obviously, and having two shorter Transformers stories instead of one long one gave the comic the ability to run reprints that wouldn’t take up the whole comic. Together, these enabled Marvel UK to reduce the budget in a harsh comics environment. The story still wasn’t written for the new five-page format yet, but between this and the US strip we got a double dose of Dreadwind and Darkwing to soften the blow, the UK strip a prequel to the American one running at the same time, which was a neat idea.
Did I mind the black and white? Not at all. On the contrary, reading Fleetway’s comics I was used to the same length of strips and a mixture of colour and monochrome. Plus, once they started to be drawn for this new format the details really began to shine in the art! Across the way in the New York firehouse Peter and Egon found themselves in another dimension fighting side-by-side with our returning villain in a story which feels epic, even if it is only six pages long. It ends with a funny visual gag of the defeated demon on a trike being chased by Ponquadragor, the story then spilling over into Spengler’s Spirit Guide and the prose story, making it a rather special issue.
It’s presented on the checklist in a way that very much makes fun of the overly complicated names in fantasy novels and films of the day.
Hasbro had released a G.I. Joe action figure kids could only get by mail order after collecting tokens from the packaging of other figures. Nothing but a mishmash of parts from previously released toys, the Supertrooper never made it into the US comic but Marvel UK brought him to life in Action Force Monthly. I wonder if his story was a series of rehashed plot lines too? The excellent Death’s Head #6 was still on sale and the latest monthly Thundercats took the top spot yet again, with one of the new stories written by friend of the blog John Freeman, no less.
Both Action Force and Thundercats presenting “classic” tales should’ve been a sign of things to come for readers of the two main comics, both of which would “re-present” classic stories before the year was out. While Transformers had a long history to pull from, it was particularly galling to suddenly “have another chance to read” content in the much younger Real Ghostbusters. However, it was a sign of the times across the whole industry.
Now officially past the halfway point, there’ll be another checklist next week, and the week after, all the way until the festive season. See you in seven.
This is a fun little extra for Death’s Head fans out there, with emphasis on the words “fun” and “little”. We’ll get to that, first up though let’s set the scene by beginning at the, well, beginning of #173 of Marvel UK’sDoctor Who Magazine. I’m already taking umbrage though. How could they revert to the 70s logo when the latest series to have aired was the Sylvester McCoy era and my favourite series logo of all?
Oh well, inside there’s an interesting mixture of features and contemporary news, the latter of which reports on rumours surrounding the return of the show and much of it really was clutching at straws. The mag still had to report on it, after all we were in the pre-internet gossip days, so how else would the readers get their fix? It reminds me of the year or so before the Knight Rider sequel series launched in 2008, when I’d clamour for every juicy morsel of official news (but not spoilers, naturally).
On a side note, I loved everything I heard about that new Knight Rider and the pilot movie was ace. But when it went to series NBC gave the show runner position to the guy who created The Fast and the Furious and he didn’t have a clue about Knight Rider. We were SO close to something great! A great cast, a great car, a great premise… all ruined. At least we had the movie though. It makes me wonder what a series of Doctor Who would’ve looked like if its own pilot movie five years after this issue had gone to series.
Somewhat tied in with that news page is Lies Lies Lies, a feature looking back on the wild rumours and blatant lies people had made up about Doctor Who in the past just to get some attention. It’s somewhat ironic to have this in the same issue as that news page, don’t you think? I reminds me of social media today, or even discussion forums before that, and the things included here are the reason I no longer look out for future Knight Rider (or Doctor Who) news anymore. Some things never change.
Having recently watched all of the Seventh Doctor’s stories I don’t understand the hate it received from some corners of the fandom, but then again those corners are still there today moaning about the latest series so I still don’t understand them. I loved these stories. Stills of The Happiness Patrol in particular always made it look rather weird and I had a feeling of dread going into it, but it was fantastic!
Through this strange outer shell was a solid gold story and I particularly liked the feel of the dystopian future and the ending as described here, with the Doctor and Ace bringing sorrow, pain and sadness to a world forced to be happy. A happy ending through the importance of feeling sad. Again, it was brilliant! I found this feature about the writing of the story fascinating too. You should really give it a read.
Back in the 90s I collected Babylon 5 on VHS tapes, spending £8.99 for each volume of just two episodes. Or if we wanted to see the outtakes from Red Dwarf or find out how Thunderbirds was made we’d to fork out for additional tapes at about the same price. In the same decade the BBC had an idea which sounds equally bizarre when we’re so used to extras being include in our purchases today. Long before iPlayer The Eras Tapes were a way to get caught up on the earliest adventures with a rather random selection of episodes tied together by video links of Sean Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy. A real product of the time.
Elsewhere in this issue is a Fourth Doctor prose story and a humour strip written by Steve Noble (who I couldn’t find credits for when I wrote about Red Dwarf Smegazine) and drawn by OiNK’sKev F. Unfortunately, there are also the kind of Doctor Who episode reviews (of then-recent VHS releases) that are more suited to today’s internet than the official mag. Much like certain modern online reviews they’re overly long, overly negative and the reviewer is more interested in promoting themselves and how ‘clever’ they are than writing honestly. There are even letters of complaint about this reviewer!
But anyway, for Death’s Heads fans the wait is over. Party Animals is the issue’s comic strip, written by Gary Russell, pencilled by Mike Collins (Zoids, Transformers, Captain Britain), inked by Steve Pini (Knights of Pendragon, Bloodlines) and lettered by Gary Gilbert (Transformers, Thundercats, 2000AD). Gary Russell would have a huge career in the universe of the Doctor, including becoming editor of this magazine from the next year, script editor on The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and producer on Big Finish’s audio dramas.
So just why is this issue of Doctor Who Magazine in this section of the blog? In this strip the Seventh Doctor is visiting a bar at the centre of the space-time vortex run by Bonjaxx, whose birthday it is. Everyone from across space and time frequents this bar and have turned out to celebrate. Friends and enemies drink side-by-side as the Doctor and Ace meet two mysterious strangers, the Doctor and the other man exchanging a cryptic conversation while Ace and Ria get caught up in the inevitable 80s movie-style bar brawl.
In the end we find out the other man is a future incarnation of the Doctor, which is rather disappointing. His face may have been based on Nicholas Briggs from Big Finish (who supplies the current show’s Dalek voices) but this depiction does him no favours, the character coming across as rather boring. Even his costume makes him look more like a maître d, so the twist in the tale is a bit flat as a result. But the real highlight here was always going to be the bar itself and the wonderful array of cameos for readers to spot and their funny interactions both before and during the fight.
As you can see, our resident Freelance Peacekeeping Agent was also taking a well deserved break, at least until a Meep got a bit angry and things escalated as only bar fights can. Death’s Head is only in a few panels but he makes his presence felt and thankfully this was before his horrible redesign for Death’s Head II. It’s an insane little piece, although I’ve no doubt there are some who took it far too seriously and either saw it as proof these characters all existed in the same universe, got annoyed that it was “timeline/universe inaccurate” or who went to great lengths to explain how they could all be together.
Relax! It’s just a bit of fun. After all, that’s what comics are for. It even has Bart Simpson in it and some Daleks actually enjoying themselves in the background! It was a lovely surprise stumbling upon this Death’s Head cameo then purchasing it for the blog. Not only because of him, but also the amount of time I spent pouring over every panel to see who I could recognise. There were some genuine moments of laughter to be had when spotting them.
Finishing off the rest of the magazine I wanted to touch upon Enlightening, a superb interview with director Fiona Cumming, especially as it counters some corners of today’s online world. There were so many hateful men complaining about seeing women’s names on writing and directing credits during Jodie Whittaker’s and Ncuti Gatwa’s runs but the 1980s got there first. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many in the credits during this era. How little the sexist trolls actually know, eh?
There are some great nuggets of information here. It’s strange to read how little the writer was involved in the production back then, or that much like today whole seasons were filmed out of order. The latter is testament to Janet Fielding’s and Sarah Sutton’s talent in acting out their characters getting to know each other even though they’d been working together for months already. There’s a lovely Jon Pertwee story too, as well as some very clever examples of using set design to get around the tight budgets.
I certainly wouldn’t have said Doctor Who was famous for its incidental music back then, some of it was atrocious, especially in the 70s. However, in Sylvester’s years it really was superb, with each story individually tailored for and I loved hearing the theme tune woven into the episodes in various ways, something we’d never had before and wouldn’t get again until Jodie’s era. It’s a great article so I’ve included it all here for you to read.
Yes, I really did fork out for an old Doctor Who Magazine because Death’s Head was the star of three panels of a comic strip! As a fan of Doctor Who I was never going to complain though. I always enjoy reading contemporary coverage of such things, even despite the negatives mentioned above. Thankfully the positives (most of all the strip itself, of course) more than make up for any shortcomings. A fun little addition to the Death’s Head section of the blog, yes?
The Real Ghostbusters didn’t have the most exciting of covers this week despite having Anthony Williams’ talent behind it. Over on Transformers and Visionaries meanwhile, for a few weeks the covers would remind readers they now had two stories for the Cybertronians inside.
John Stokes returned for #214’s cover and while the Mecannibals were a fun villain the hyping of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fight between Megatron and a Decepticon not mentioned until now is a choice. The American story wins out this week thanks to shady subterfuge from Dreadwind and Darkwing and the funny way they bicker while in their combined form. As a teen it was extra exciting because I’d previously played with the toys of these characters at my friend’s house.
In New York, hair cuttings on a barber’s floor came back to life and, hilariously, Slimer got a job as a ghostwriter! Brilliant. The Real Ghostbusters’ creative team had the best imaginations. Also, after previous issues had contradicted the cartoon, an answer to a letter references the episode that explained the change to their uniforms compared to the movie’s, so someone was paying attention after all. Okay, it’s checklist time.
Yes, Marvel UK, you could say more for Death’s Head. This is a bit too close to that dreaded and overused “Nuff said” phrase they seemed to trot out ad nauseam in their editorials around this time. It was a great issue and this really doesn’t sell it, although it must’ve been difficult only having one paragraph for each of five comics. Alongside the continuing presence of Action Force Monthly #11 is Doctor Who Magazine, which finally seems to be a regular addition to the list.
It’s taken long enough, although I suppose you could argue this is a comics checklist and DWM is a magazine, so that could be why it wasn’t featured for the first several months. Coincidentally enough, I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the very beginning (the very beginning from 1963) for a couple of years and I’ve just watched Silver Nemesis for the first time about a month ago. It was a good ‘un so I can understand why it proved so popular.
I never did collect the Collected Comics series for my two main Marvel comics, although it was one of the Transformers specials that got me into it in the first place. As a kid, once I was reading the weeklies I didn’t see the point in collecting stories I’d already read. As an adult though, I appreciated getting the chance to enjoy classic tales all in one go and catching up on certain story arcs at regular intervals in my Transformers real time read through.
Finally, that Spring Specials advert certainly showed the variety in Marvel’s range, didn’t it? I’m surprised they put them all together on one page rather than separating them into genres or age groups. As it stands, I’ve no recollection of Snorks or Wimple Village, however I do remember Care Bears being on TV Sunday mornings, I’ve reviewed the Visionaries already and I owned that Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends poster mag. Hmm, now that I see this I do remember buying the ‘Collected Stories’ (as they were called) for Thoma, so that’s made a liar out of me!
That’s us for another week and we’re now officially halfway through the lifespan of The Mighty Marvel Checklist. See you in seven.
It was an exciting week as a Transformers reader this week in 1989, which John Stokes’ cover sums up perfectly. Meanwhile, the perfect pairing of Andy Lanning and Dave Harwood worked their funny magic with The Real Ghostbusters.
My friends who were long-time Transformers readers weren’t too enamoured with the new three-story format in the newly-retitled Transformers and Visionaries. We now had a pair of five-or-six-page Transformers stories (and the same size of back up) every week but they preferred the previous 11-page strip and found it hard to adjust. I was used to Fleetway’s action comics though, so this felt like an upgrade over the previous format, even if it took a while before the UK strips were written for the new format.
Visionaries was yet another reprint of the origin tale (to give the American G.I. Joe comic time to get ahead again) but that didn’t dampen things for me as a teen. Although, now I think a reprint of an early G.I. Joe from years before may have been better, as many readers would’ve read this back up strip just the previous Christmas! As a whole it all felt fresh, new and exciting though, and would lead to what would eventually become my favourite period of time with the comic. It also kicked things off with the superbly titled, “Guess Who the Mecannibals Are Having for Dinner?” Great fun.
Obviously, this issue was going to take the top spot on the checklist. It was a mammoth change to such a long-running comic. Yes, it was to save money down the road amid rising production costs. By changing to this format they could churn out the British strips in black and white and run some reprints while still having new strips for the readers, but young me wasn’t aware of all of that and it deserved this fanfare regardless.
Alongside The Real Ghostbusters are the same editions of Marvel UK’s monthly Action Force and Thundercats as last week but we did have some brand spanking new comics adverts. Cartoon Time was essentially the Flinstones and Friends comic from earlier checklists in all but name. That had made it to 24 issues before cancellation and was basically rebranded as Cartoon Time, each issue’s main title relating to a different Hanna Barbera character with the “Cartoon Time” banner off to the side or top.
It certainly proved popular, running for 40 fortnightly issues before turning monthly. This would normally signal the beginning of the end for a comic but Cartoon Time continued for another 38 monthly issues after that, so fair play. Our other advert is for a Doctor Who graphic novel collecting a strip from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, starring Colin Baker’sSixth Doctor and Frobisher, his penguin companion. No, really.
In reality (well, you know what I mean) Frobisher could take on any form but for some reason preferred to be a talking penguin, and he and the Doctor found themselves on a Death Ship falling off the edge of the universe. The 80s TV show couldn’t have brought this to the screen! It sounds wonderfully inventive and I’m aware it stands in high regard with fans even today.
There are new issues of some top Marvel UK monthlies in next week’s checklist and a whole host of Spring Specials in the ads to jog your memories. See you then!
Dave Huxley may have only contributed to three issues of OiNK but that didn’t stop the Crickey! fanzine from asking him to talk about the comic back in 2008. Dedicated to the nostalgia of classic British comics, Crikey! kicked off as a quarterly before it quickly became bi-monthy, eventually added more colour and ended up with a proper distribution deal before distributors Borders collapsed, taking the magazine with it.
I’ll admit this is the only issue I’ve read and that’s because I saw the OiNK logo on it while browsing eBay, and the corresponding article is one of the main highlights of the issue. It isn’t an interview, it’s actually written by Dave himself and at times it can be wonderfully insightful. Sadly, it kicks off with the Viz comparison, despite that comic not being mainstream at the time nor an influence on the OiNK creative team. And, Tom Thug a “Viz-like character”?
Interestingly, Dave wasn’t hired by the team to create his first piece, the Mona Lisow (the name given to it by the editors), instead he sent it in unsolicited and they saw in him a potential part of the team. He returned in #43, my favourite regular issue and the second Christmas edition with The Hamformers and there’s a funny story included here about his kids appearing on that one.
Dave says he had more ideas to come after his third and final piece, The Statue of Piggery in #55 but never had the chance to develop them due to OiNK’s cancellation. Although, since his first page appeared in #36 and OiNK lasted until its 68th issue I wish he’d developed them a bit quicker! While it’s an interesting article, unfortunately there’s a glaring error included.
I’m not talking about some of the grammatical mistakes or even the misspelling of Mark Rodgers’ name. While Crikey! had a habit of including factual errors in its articles in its early issues, when someone who worked on a comic (albeit briefly) is the guest writer I suppose you’d expect it to be accurate. Unfortunately, the fanzine’s lack of fact-checking is clear when Dave spins the tale of why OiNK ended up cancelled.
Yes, the Janice and John strip did lead to a complaint being lodged with the Press Council and W.H.Smith (R.I.P.) did top-shelf it, but that strip was published right back at the beginning, in #7. It wasn’t the reason the comic was cancelled nearly two-and-a-half-years later! That myth of the complaint bringing about the end of OiNK did circulate at one time though, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Dave either.
However, the fact remains that it’s just not true. I’ve covered the evolution and eventual cancellation of OiNK in-depth throughout its real-time read through. Put basically, when Fleetway took over all of IPC’s comics they placed them into sales groups and if the combined sales of each group wasn’t good enough they’d all be cancelled. But OiNK survived its group’s culling; its sales were impressive to IPC (about 100,000 per issue) but Fleetway wanted more. The publisher changing it to a weekly and then to a larger monthly were well-meaning changes but ultimately they are what led to a decrease in sales, long after the complaint shenanigans.
Also, I was aware of Dan Dare and knew who Mary Whitehouse was, so they were hardly included for mature readers.
Despite these errors it’s still nice to read how OiNK was held in such high regard by one of its contributors many years later, even when he only had a very limited amount of work for it. While it doesn’t apply to OiNK, I do agree with Dave’s final sentiment. It’s something that’s still very much prevalent today.
While we’re here I spotted a few little moments elsewhere in this issue that might be of particular interest to OiNK Blog readers. In an article about Warrior comic V for Vendetta is included (although I think the writer has twisted the story to suit his own politics) along with some of David Lloyd’s artwork. This was between 1982 and 1985, the same time David was producing the gorgeous artwork for the first two Knight Rider Annuals that have featured on the blog.
In a quick look at the short-lived Thunder we have brief mentions of Dusty Binns and The Terrible Trail to Tolmec, drawn by Ring Raiders’Geoff Campion (also misspelled) and Wildcat’sMassimo Belardinelli respectively, and both artists also contributed to licenced anthology horror comic Super Naturals at different stages.
Elsewhere, there are a few articles about girls’ comics, one of which asks why girls enjoyed them so much? It seems to have been too much to ask that Crikey! hire a woman to answer the question, though. Gil Page, who was still working for Egmont at the time spends much of an article about classic comics bitching about the modern market, which is a bit surprising given his employer. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of this sort of thing throughout, which dampens the reading experience. For example, an otherwise interesting article about Commando loses me the moment the writer starts to complain about today’s “politically correct world”. Sigh.
This has been a curious little read. I’ve heard a lot of good things about later issues, especially when other comics professionals came in to write about their work and I can’t fault the ambition of the comics fans who put this together in the first place. While this particular issue hasn’t really been for me, it’s always good to see OiNK get some love long after it was gone.
This week’s Marvel UK cover for The Real Ghostbusters by Brian Williamson and Dave Harwood was overshadowed by the strap line for me. Also, at the time I didn’t realise this week’s Transformers and Action Force cover was something of a big deal.
That’s because it was drawn by John Stokes (Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Invisibles), making his first return to the weekly in three years. The story was great, focusing on the mental toll of being the human part of a Head Master, while the big changes coming next week were hyped with a full-page Next Issue promo. However, it contained no text or details, just three comics panels. The editorial made a big deal about Visionaries returning without mentioning it’d be a reprint. How very on brand after last week’s checklist post (link below).
So yes, that Atari ST competition in The Real Ghostbusters really takes me back. I always loved the look of that machine and was in awe of how a friend used his to produce incredible music, albeit a few years after this, so I never entered at the time. Strip-wise, after contradicting the cartoon last week the comic now contradicts itself by featuring Father Time, forgetting he’d already appeared in a completely different guise in an earlier issue. It was still fun though, as always. On to the checklist.
Death’s Head remains because let’s face it we all should’ve bought every single issue, it was that good and deserved more success. There are also a few details for you there about the sheer amount of stories The Real Ghostbusters comic could include in its 24 pages every week, while Transformers’ checklist entry does little to sell its fantastic, human story beyond a basic action piece. But hey, they had to get the kids interested so we won’t hold that against them.
Action Force Monthly was Marvel UK’s attempt to repackage their content back to the States (as ‘G.I. Joe The European Missions‘), so they had a forgivable excuse for including some reprints. Some of the regular features from the ol’ weekly a couple of years previous were also making their way back into the comic, giving it a feeling of being in rude health. Such a shame in five short months it would just… stop! But those UK stories were superb, the few that I’ve read anyway.
A short one this week but the adverts return in seven days, featuring a dog, a cat and a penguin! You’ll see what that’s all about in week 37 of The Mighty Marvel Checklist.
OiNK Blog 